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Time is still proving to be an issue, there are just not enough hours in the day to do all the genealogy I would like. I am still working on reducing the number of distractions in my life, such as the number of emails I get each day (I am glad not to have Twitter or Facebook to worry about).

I can also see that my research has become much more focused, normally I would be switching from family to family on an almost daily basis, but this week I have been focused on the Australian BATEMANs. I didn’t actually do much new research this week, but I did find a newspaper announcement of the death of Annie Clark BATEMAN, which interestingly lists all her brothers and sisters and her husband, but not her children.

I have done some work on their addresses, and I am currently pulling together addresses from various sources (mainly Electoral Rolls) and updating the details on Family Historian. This is throwing up the age old problem of how do I record the place names from the Australian Electoral Rolls, how much detail do I record in the place name field and how much in the source citations?

My lack of knowledge of all things Australian is starting to become obvious, I need to do some background reading on Australian genealogy and perhaps even get hold of some old maps. I keep trying to relate things back to English genealogy, but I have no idea how similar the records are or whether the process is similar or not.

This week I am going to focus on places, decide how I am going to record all the information. For now I just need to make sure I have all the information recorded somewhere, whether I keep it in the same format or not in the future is a different question.

I also want to try and fill in some gaps in the English side of William Joseph Henry BATEMAN’s life. The first step will be to get copies of his parent’s marriage certificate and his birth certificate. Both of these should be in Brighton, Sussex so that will give me some more local information to follow up. I also need to see if I can untangle WJH’s naval career and find out what further information I might be able to discover, I probably need to get hold of a copy of a guide to naval ancestors from the library.